


ancestral sin

by yavanei



Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DCU (Comics), Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, the unholy trinity tm, there are not enough fics exploring this trio
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2017-02-23
Packaged: 2018-09-26 10:17:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9887996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yavanei/pseuds/yavanei
Summary: She can’t bring Clark back. She can only try to move forward. And that knowledge weighs on her as heavy as the ring around her neck.She never wears it in front of Lex. It’s too personal. It’s an easy target. So, it hangs close to her heart. Dangling on a precipice from a silver chain, wrapped tight around her neck, concealed in her blouse.Sometimes she thinks it might choke her.





	

She’s here again. Sitting across from him. Eyes fixed directly on his. He suspects he knows why. There’s a twisted sense of intimacy in the way the silence engulfs them, the way they can hear the steady drumming of their own heartbeats in their ears.

He chews at his fingernails. She chews at the side of her gums.

He waits for her to break first. It’s become a bit of a game to him – torturing her like this, letting the silence drag on until she is forced to pretend. She isn’t so bad at it either, this facade of an inquisitive reporter. She’s good at that – controlling her emotions, channeling what she needs to in order to get her story, in order to reach her end goal. He admires that about her, because in a way it reminds him of himself.

She busies herself, taking out a notepad and pen, and he watches as she unconsciously tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear.

She still smells the same.

The realization hits him with such clarity as he inhales, his eyes fluttering closed for a brief moment.

Coconut, he thinks. The scent hits him square in the chest, laced with something else familiar - the musk of a man’s cologne. His hands slide down her arms, his grip adjusting, and he knows she senses it too. The uncomfortable proximity. The way he leans a little too close into her touch. The way he  _relishes_  in it.

He wonders at her. This woman, this fearless reporter. How did she do it?

She made the impossible possible.

She ensnared a God.

And,  _god_ , he finds that insulting and captivating all at once.

The breeze whips her hair back and that intoxicating scent rushes through him again.

She shifts in his hold, pulling away from him with a snarl placed perfectly on her soft, full lips. A tiny, tiny hint of fear radiates off of her. He shudders with delight.

“Mmm, not so fast, Miss Lane,” he says, latching hold of her again.

She struggles in his grip, and it takes him a moment to regain his balance. Truthfully, she could probably break free with little effort. Lex isn’t ignorant to his lack of physical prowess, but he’s no stranger to playing from a position of weakness.

His fingers chance upon a bare touch of her skin as he pulls her closer and his fingers burn with the memory.

Her lips are moving in front of him now, propelling him out of his brief haze. The memories of that day on the rooftop seem to be a lifetime ago, yet the clarity with which he can still savor every detail makes it difficult to focus on what she’s saying.  She heaves a small, little sigh, looking back at the glass, her brow furrowing.

“I’m – ” he struggles, clears his throat. “I’m sorry. Repeat that.”

He mentally berates himself for a moment. He’s falling back on old habits – a veneer of politeness. It’s useless in a place like this. Utterly useless when he can feel the cold metal latched around his ankles, practically biting into his skin through the fabric of the orange jumpsuit. She knows what he is. A small part of him thinks she’s always known, even before that fateful day on the rooftop. He remembers fielding questions from a fiery redhead Daily Planet reporter at several of his functions over the years – to say she made an impression on him would be an understatement.

 “You know why I’m here, Lex. You know why I’ll keep coming here until I get what I want.”

The way his name rolls off her tongue makes him crack a smile. Absolute disgust. There’s no use hiding with her anymore.

“Say, Lo – can I call you Lo? Or is that, like, a Clark-only thing?”

Her lips part momentarily, clearly caught off guard by the nickname, but her hesitation is replaced quickly with a stony expression and fury blazes in her eyes.

“No.”

Lex draws an elbow onto the table and lazily rests his head against his palm.

“Then by all means, Lo,” he chuckles mirthlessly when her eyes narrow again, “Get on with it.”

 

*****

 

“Why did you do it?”

The words escape her before she can think, can seal her lips, can stop herself from asking something that is only bound to bring a man like him some sick pleasure. She knows why. But it’s in this moment she isn’t asking as Lois Lane, the reporter. She’s asking as Lois Lane, the woman who dared to love.

She can’t turn back time. She can’t bring Clark back. She can only try to move forward. And that knowledge weighs on her as heavy as the ring around her neck.

She never wears it in front of Lex. It’s too personal. It’s an easy  _target_. So, it hangs close to her heart. Dangling on a precipice from a silver chain, wrapped tight around her neck, concealed in her blouse.

Sometimes she thinks it might choke her.

He raises an eyebrow, as if he’s pondering her question for a moment. She tries to keep her face impassive, digs her nails into her palm so hard she thinks they may bleed, and waits.

Waits for the inevitability of his satisfaction, his twisted glee.

Only it doesn’t come.

“I had to.”

The words are so simple, yet they deafen her. There’s an undercurrent of rawness in his voice, an honesty that makes her chest tighten and her fingers scrabble for purchase against her notepad, eyes flicking down in cowardice. She can’t look at him when the blue of his eyes is boring into her like that.

For the first time, he answers her as something other than Lex Luthor, the villain of this twisted tale. He answers her as Lex Luthor, the —

The –

What is he? What is he if he’s not the villain of this story?

And then the prison guards are pulling him away from the table, telling her that all her time is up, and Lois wishes he had laughed at her instead.

It was so much easier when he laughed.

 

* * *

 

 

Perry thinks she’s sick. She can see it in his eyes; can hear it in his voice. He doesn’t understand.

“Why do you keep visiting him, Lois?”

“I told you. I don’t have the full story yet.”

“We’ve been over this. There is no story. We already know everything that happened between him and Superman. He’s told you everything you’re going to get.”

“No, there’s more. I just need some more time with him, Perry. Why won’t you trust me with this?”

“Lois. Ever since Superman… ever since Clark…..” He trails off, and Lois can already tell where he’s heading.

“You’re not in the best place right now. I told you I didn’t want you coming back to work so soon and here we are.”

“This is all I have anymore, Perry,” she practically spits the words, her bottom lip quivering in anger.

Perry stills for a moment. She knows she’s gone too far.

“I’m putting you on leave. This obsession isn’t healthy for you.”

“Obsession?!” she barks the word, caught halfway between a laugh and revulsion. “You – you think I’m  _obsessed_  with him?”

“No, Lois,” he sighs, and she hates that he sounds like a disapproving father. “I think you’re too close to this story and you can’t tell where your head’s at anymore. I sure as hell can’t.”

She tries to argue. Tries to plead. She tries every trick in her book but Perry remains steadfast.

She packs up her belongings later that day and returns to a cold and empty apartment – an apartment that still smells like Clark.

The tile is cold beneath her bare skin where she sits, her hair is unwashed and the truth is… she no longer recognizes herself in the mirror. Running water fills the tub to the brim, and she remembers with a sudden, visceral, clarity the way he used to touch her. Fingers grazing in loving circles across her neck, her shoulders, her back, inside of her –

A sob racks its way through her body.

As she sinks beneath the warm water, she desperately wills the world to disappear.

 

* * *

 

He looks surprised to see her when the guards escort him inside, and his eyes never leave hers as they busy themselves with restraining him to the table.  

He must not have expected her to return after their last conversation, and a small part of her feels triumphant that she is able to keep a man such as him off-balance, but the way he looks at her still unnerves her.

It’s as if he wants to take her apart piece by piece and reassemble her – like he’s carving her bone structure into the etchings of his mind, filing it away for later use. What that use might be… she isn’t sure she wants to know.

She shivers in the cold air of the cramped space.

The game has changed. He didn’t have the courtesy to tell her. No longer does he wait to see who breaks the silence first. Instead, he smoothly cuts through all the bullshit with his forked tongue, putting her on the defense before she can smother down all the emotions swirling in her head.

“A bit fast, don’t you think? I mean, give the man some time to get settled in the grave before, well,  _you know_.”

Her forehead creases in slight confusion until she follows the trail of his eyes to her left hand where the ring sparkles in the ugly fluorescence of the lights.

She has made a grave mistake today.

“That’s none of your business.”

Lex draws his hands up, as much as the chain will allow, clasping them together under his chin for support.

“Isn’t it? I just hate that I had to break up such a lovely couple.”

She knows he’s toying with her. He knows, now. He knows everything. She hates him for it. It’s a primal kind of hate in the pit of her gut that festers and grows with every passing day. As a journalist, she prides herself on information. Gaining it. Spreading it. Informing others.

But Lex is a locked safety deposit box. He’s a goddamn vault. He’s got so much information in his head that she wants to tear him apart with her bare hands and sink her teeth into his brain. She can’t even keep one secret from him properly, and it infuriates her that he’s latched onto another truth of hers.

His lips upturn in a quaint, pleasant smile, as if he’s not systematically ruining her from the inside out and she makes a noise low in her throat that sounds like a cross between a petulant whine and a growl.

He smiles like he’s won a get-out-of-jail free card and he’s currently dominating the entire monopoly board.

“Enough, you sick bastard,” she hisses.

“Orphan, I’m afraid. Though he did occasionally call me a bastard,” Lex frowns for a moment. “I’ll have to remember to tell you all about my wonderful father one of these days.”

 

*****

 

The earliest he can recall is when he was nine.

It is an old memory, and some things change in memory. For example, he often wonders whether he was sitting cross legged in his father’s armchair or if he was at the table. The details escape him, though he knows they matter little now. The end is always quite the same.

The worn pages of Plato’s Republic crinkle as he turns them, and the creak of footsteps echoes in the hallway.

The bone-deep feeling of dread never changes though. It’s the one detail he can’t forget.

_You’re weak, Lex. How do you expect to survive if you get an asthma attack every time something happens?_

_You’ve been given everything and you’re still a disappointment._

It wasn’t the bruises that ruined him. It wasn’t the fact that no matter what he did he couldn’t possibly measure up to his father’s absurd standards. It was the fear. The lack of control. Letting someone inferior to him rule him for so long. He understands this now.

He doesn’t remember his mother. He has seen pictures. They’re faded and crinkled around the edges. They’re the kind of pictures that don’t truly tell you anything about the person. He wonders if this was by his father’s own design.

Her smile is radiant. Perfect. (Too perfect.) Her hair is the color of his and her eyes are a misty blue. Beyond her physical characteristics, there’s nothing there to latch onto. He may as well be looking at a ghost. She is nothing but a porcelain doll to look beautiful next to father.

Part of him hates her for this.

He is sixteen when he sheds blood.

An ominous bang – bang – bang, bang, rattles against the front door later that evening. A police officer steps instead to soberly inform him his father has been found dead. He is orphaned and alone. He hopes his tears look genuine.

The house stands empty and hollow. A mausoleum he intends to keep as proof that he was the Alexander left standing in the end. His father, on the other hand, is on his way to becoming a rotting carcass. Like any good son, he pours himself some Kentucky Mash in his father’s memory and promptly toasts to his demise.

It is the same day he finally understands the way to wield power and what freedom is. It is not reckless abandonment, as some may lead you to believe. It is controlled precision. It doesn’t take him long to transform his father’s dying company into something vibrant and new. He passes old anecdotes about dear old daddy to business associates and has people eating out of the palm of his hand in record time.

The day the world is introduced to the Superman is the first time since he was a teenager he feels that feeling of dread again.

He doesn’t sleep for the next week, and when he does it’s generally face-first into his keyboard.

The nightmares start again, only they are different. Superman injects himself into every facet of Lex’s life and he can slowly feel himself cracking beneath the surface. Rage boils up inside him in a way he no longer knew was possible, and it becomes increasingly harder to manage it. He can. He will. He has to.  

LEX/OS is unveiled the following month, and he makes his first move on the chess board as he begins the long process of tracking down Superman and other metahumans.

 

*****

 

His fingers drum against the steel of the cold table, fingernails tapping in irregular patterns.

“Would you indulge me, Miss Lane?” he asks.

She scoffs, folding her arms across her chest. “I think we both know I’m already doing that.”

“Your friend…the Bat,” he derisively snorts. “He is still working to get me transferred to Arkham. Our fun little staring contests will be at an end soon, Lola.”

“He isn’t my friend. I barely know him.”

“Still, indulge me… just this once.”

“Fine,” she snaps.

“What was he like?”

“Who?”

“Your Superman. Clark Kent. Smallville.”

Her eyes cut a jagged glance in his direction, and truthfully she knows she shouldn’t play this game with him, but her competitive spirit seems to rear its ugly head in his presence worse than usual.

“I doubt I can tell you anything you don’t already know, seeing as you clearly did your homework and thoroughly stalked him.”

“Then tell me, why him?”

She hesitates. He inches forward in his seat, holding his breath, as if her answer is a lifeline he desperately wants to cling to.

“Before Superman,” she starts. “Before Clark, I didn’t have as much faith.”

Lex quirks an eyebrow, his curiosity sufficiently piqued. “Faith in what? God?”

“No...” she looks away again. “No, I meant faith in humanity.”

The other shoe has officially dropped. Lois decides she has truly, deeply, officially lost it. Perry was right. Her head is absolutely not on straight anymore.

The devil sitting across from her took away the man she loved, caused the deaths of countless people, and she’s talked to him more in a single month than she has Martha Kent. It isn’t remotely rational that she’s telling him these things. She knows it’s sick, she knows it doesn’t make any real kind of sense, but… he was  _there._

Lex was there every single step of the way. Wherever Superman went, Lex Luthor followed. He is a formless shadow cast across her life with Clark, and as twisted as it is he is the only person who makes her feel like Clark is still with her anymore. He is responsible for everything. He is the ultimate source. Not second hand. Not anonymous. Never off the record. He’s the last bastion of knowledge where Clark is concerned, he knows more about Kryptonian ancestry and technology than anyone else alive, and he engineered the monster who defeated the man of steel.

She hates him, but she’s an addict all the same. Knowledge is power.

He smiles, smoothing his hands against the table until the tips of his fingers are nearly touching her own. He doesn’t say anything, but there’s an unspoken look in his eyes that says:  _Yes, I understand. I understand completely. Humanity is a fickle bitch. It needs to be protected from itself._

 

* * *

 

He’s a devil masquerading as an angel, and there’s a filthy rush of joy in stripping him of his wings. His symbol is not a cross, but what any normal human would imagine is an emblazoned S, but the power is there all the same. He’s a religious, almost divine specimen.

Lex marvels at the way the creature falls to his knees before him. Broken and tormented, despair licking at the very base of his soul. His hands shake around the polaroids as all the rage bottled up inside him threatens to spill over.

It’s intoxicating. It shakes the universe.

And Lex smiles. His pulse races.

He wants to touch him. To reach his fingers out just a little further and wrap them in the creature’s still rain-soaked hair.

In reality, he relents. His fingers lovingly graze the air around his face, but do not touch. Never touch. To touch him would break the silent boundary between them, would catapult them into a place of unknowns and Lex Luthor has never been fond of the unknown.

But oh. In dreams it’s a different story.

In dreams, he grips the pretender’s chin with lithe fingers, runs a thumb along the bottom of his lip, and Lex can hear him moan. He presses further, sliding his thumb along grit teeth, and hisses when the devil bites him hard enough to bleed.

Lex draws his hand back and smears his cracked lips with the fruit of his labor. He leaves Clark bloodstained. He leaves him with an indelible mark of himself.

Lex grabs at his hair then, fingernails brutally scraping down his scalp, and jerks his head back. Clark whimpers in protest, and the small noise only fuels Lex’s desire.

He is Apollo, he is the sun, and Lex is a shadow.

In dreams, the false god looks up at him, and calls him “Master.”

In dreams, Lex deconstructs and destroys him so utterly, so completely, that by the end of it, Clark Joseph Kent is  _thanking_  him.

Sometimes these dreams are the only company he has in the monotony that has become his norm in prison. He relishes them every night, though it often leaves him feeling even hollower in the morning.

 

* * *

 

The rain pulses around him, leaving rivulets of tears against the leather of his gloves. He revs the engine of his ducati, and leaves the green glow of the stoplight behind him.

The vehicle is soft and quiet racing through the velvet of the night.

He was released from jail only a week ago, thanks to an incredible defense attorney and the fact that Bruce Wayne was rather desperate for his help with his new boy band. The news began calling them “The Justice League.” Hilarious, really, given they were all the individuals Lex had tracked down months prior. Bruce was clearly incapable of doing his own footwork and piggy-backed off the files he stole from Lex. No matter, though, as providing information for the new do-gooders in town helped him clean up his nearly destroyed image.

As he makes a sharp turn into the drive, he idly wonders if she chose this place on purpose, knowing just how to get under his skin. Was this payback for all the times he tried to bury himself inside the fabric of their lives?

He skids to a halt outside the abandoned cathedral, shaking off his helmet. The stained glass windows look down at him in warning as if to say:  _you don’t belong here._

His feet fall in heavy steps upon Superman’s memorial plaque as he enters the darkened hall.

He makes his way down the rows, eyes flicking to and fro between the candles lighting his path.

The straightest path to Superman is a pretty little road called Lois Lane, he’d once said.

How right he’d been.

“Is this the first place you thought to meet?”

Truthfully, he doesn’t understand why they’re meeting in the first place. They have a connection he can’t quite wrap his head around, and one he suspects she will never truly acknowledge – a connection forged from shared experiences with an alien being masquerading as one of them, a being wholly beyond either of them. She in the role of Clark's lover, and he playing the part of Superman's enemy. How strange that love and hate can be so similar.

He often feels like he was a dirty little secret of hers when they met in prison. He is well aware she would not hesitate to use anything against him if it suits her purpose. She is, after all, a large part of the reason he landed in jail to begin with. Yet he can’t quite dislike her for it. Not entirely, anyway.

“I thought you’d appreciate the irony,” she replies blithely, still turned away from him.

The woman never misses a beat.

He glares at her back, fingers twitching in the confines of his gloves. He wants to wrap his hands around her throat sometimes and squeeze, but he settles for lightly brushing the strands of her hair away from her neck before resting his damp gloves on her shoulder.

She flinches. It’s the only warning he gets before his head snaps to the side from the impact of her hand striking his cheek, leaving a red welt in its wake.

Lex purses his lips, a small grunt escaping him as he clenches his jaw.

He opens his mouth, preparing to speak, to taunt her with words and hurt her the way she’s hurt him. Only her hand is back, smoothing out the redness on his cheek, and there is water dripping from her eyelashes.

He has the strangest, most overwhelming urge to comfort her and is shocked when she doesn’t push him away.

She whispers hoarsely into the crook of his neck, “You’re a monster. They never should have let you out.”

He can feel her lips at the hollow of his throat and her words sting bittersweet.

“Shhhh,” he murmurs.

She is stiff in his arms, never truly off guard. (And who could blame her? He did shove her off a rooftop once. Though, in his defense, he knew she would be just fine.) He shifts slightly, inhaling the scent of her hair. He lets out a shaky sigh.

The only thing that can be heard for the next several moments is the rain pounding against the roof of the church, and her labored breathing.

"I miss him too,” he finally says.

And he realizes it’s not entirely a lie.

The three of them. Trapped in each other’s web. A triumvirate of body, soul, and mind.

Were they fated to do this forever?

 

* * *

 

Must there be a Superman?

One may as well be asking: must there be a God?

He never believed in God as a benevolent father in the sky. He never went to church and lit candles, never kneeled before the altar, never made promises of virtue.

Perhaps when he was younger he believed an omnipotent power in the sky could have saved him from a bloody nose or an unfortunate trip tumbling down the stairs, but that boy was nothing but a pitiful memory. God is a fairytale.

The first time he bruised, he questioned.  _Are you out there?_

The second time, he prayed.  _If you are, please, help me._

The third time, he wept.  _You won’t._

He realized god was a fairytale.

And what is god but a concept? An idea. Gods exist. If they did not, it would be necessary to invent them. Anything that has been made can be unmade. It is a fundamental law of the universe.

The news is blaring when he walks into Lexcorp offices. Nearly every single monitor is on the same station.

Employees turn to glance at him, a palpable kind of apprehension in their eyes. He dealt with rumors after getting out of jail, but was able to take most of them in stride when the public learned of his generosity in helping the newly formed Justice League. Only, today, their looks border on hysteric. He turns back to the television monitors, and the world falls out from beneath him when he realizes what he missed.

_Him._

He’s there.  _Here._

His chiseled jaw glints like metal against the backdrop of the sun, and reporters and pedestrians are swarming him. They don’t know where he came from, how long he has been back, but they are desperate and hungry and the hope in their eyes makes Lex nauseous.

Lex walks away from the lobby, taking the elevator and promptly slamming the door to his office behind him when he enters.

He stares out across Metropolis, at this beautiful city he has rebuilt and destroyed and poured his entire being into and then… he laughs. He laughs, and surprisingly, there’s no edge to it. He is bordering on manic giggling by the time he wipes the tears from his eyes.

Fact 1: He loathes everything Superman represents. He does not think this will ever change.

Fact 2: He would gladly let Doomsday destroy the Man of Steel again. He has no regrets.

Fact 3: The world is simply too boring without Superman in it.

  
 

He has never been more thrilled to begin their games again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> tbh this was sitting in my drafts for ages after i watched bvs and i just now decided to add a few things to it and throw it up on here. so it's nothing fancy but there's entirely too few fics exploring this dynamic, especially in regards to lex and lois, and i loved the idea of exploring their emotions post bvs and dealing with superman's death in a really strange way. as we've seen from the comics and dcu, lex has sometimes comforted lois before and i wanted to play with that a bit.


End file.
